Associative meaning is a linguistic and psychological term that refers to how people attach meaning to language. It has six subcategories, including connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflective, and thematic meaning. It is useful for semantic analysis and can be applied in literary criticism and psychology.
Associative meaning is a label applied to certain types of associations with words and to the internalization of words and phrases, by readers or listeners. This category of meaning, as a popular label, can be traced back to a linguist named Geoffrey Leech in the 1970s. Leech developed the broader category of associative meaning into six individual subcategories that help analyze how humans understand language.
As a linguistic and psychological term, associative meaning is part of the larger category of semantics. Semantics is the study of how people attach meaning to language. In this case, meaning is associatively linked to language, which means that some of the connections language users draw may not be directly referenced in text or speech.
Within the general category of associative meaning, the six sub-categories detail the ways in which people may associate ideas with a particular piece of work. The first is connotative meaning, which is a way of describing some kind of indirection people commonly make in associating a word with a particular idea. Another category is collocative meaning, where people typically associate words that are often presented together in text or speech.
Other categories of associative meaning include social meaning, affective meaning, reflective meaning, and thematic meaning. Social meaning generally applies to associations related to interpersonal relationships, where affective meaning largely refers to the emotions of the parties involved in the communication. Reflexive meaning is based on the interplay between multiple uses or associations for a single word or phrase, and thematic meaning, as described by linguistic experts, often has to do with the sequence of words or phrases and how they come together to present a theme unified.
All categories of associative meaning are useful for presenting a semantic analysis of any text or speech. Individuals might use this type of resource in literary criticism or in a broader analysis of a piece of fiction or other literary work. Psychologists might use associative meaning in various tests and other tools to explore an individual psyche, or in research to apply to collective mindsets for a certain community. The idea of associative meaning can generally help researchers build a more complete picture of how certain communications are received by an audience and how individuals might “use” words or phrases in different contexts.
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